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De Blasio Says He’s Reformed the NYPD and Improved Police-Community Relations. The Reality is Complicated.


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Mayor de Blasio & members of the NYPD (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


“Fire Pantaleo!” the crowd chanted. “Fire Kizzy Adonis!”

At an August 14 rally on the steps of City Hall, a crowd of advocates and elected officials called on Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill to take what they said was long overdue action against police officer misconduct. Daniel Pantaleo is, of course, the officer who used a banned chokehold while arresting Staten Island resident Eric Garner in 2014, leading to Garner’s death. He was on desk duty for five years before recently being suspended after facing a disciplinary trial in which an NYPD administrative judge recommended he be terminated.

On Monday, O’Neill announced at a news conference at 1 Police Plaza that he agreed with the judge’s recommendation and dismissed Pantaleo from the force. “It is clear that Daniel Pantaleo can no longer effectively serve as a New York City police officer,” he said. “In carrying out the court’s verdict in this case, I take no pleasure. I know that many will disagree with this decision, and that is their right. There are absolutely no victors here today – not the Garner family, not the community at-large, and certainly not the courageous men and women of this police department, who put their own lives on the line every single day in service to the people of this great city.”

The far less well-known Sergeant Adonis was Pantaleo’s supervising officer when the Garner incident took place, and she has not faced a disciplinary trial, despite being served with internal disciplinary charges by the NYPD in January 2016. O’Neill said the trial would be scheduled “soon” and would take place this year. The other officers involved in Garner’s arrest, including Justin D'Amico, who filed an inflated felony charge against Garner after his death, have not faced any discipline at all. On August 21, Adonis pleaded guilty to the department charges and was docked 20 vacation days, which means a trial will no longer take place. 

For five years, the Garner case and the de Blasio administration’s response to it has tested the relationship between communities of color and the mayor’s NYPD, a relationship that de Blasio promised to repair when he first ran for mayor in 2013 -- and one he insists is significantly improved despite what happened to Eric Garner and in other cases where officers have killed unarmed civilians. But the mayor remains adherent to the “broken windows” approach to policing, focused on so-called low-level, quality-of-life offenses in order to prevent disorder and more serious crime. Critics say it mainly leads to over-policing of communities of color and disproportionate enforcement based on race, while de Blasio says he’s overseen a new, evolved iteration of broken windows that is more fair but still helps keep the city safe.

”I know that the NYPD of today is a different institution than it was just a few years ago,” de Blasio said at a news conference on Monday, responding to Pantaleo’s termination. “I know the NYPD has changed profoundly. I know that members of the NYPD learned the lessons of this tragedy. They acted on it, they did something about it. It is a beginning, but we have a lot more to do and the change has to get deeper and deeper.”

But has policing really changed markedly since de Blasio took the reigns of City Hall promising reform and healing? As de Blasio has faced intense scrutiny over the city’s handling of the Garner incident, particularly Pantaleo’s fate -- including on the presidential debate stage -- does that case exemplify broader problems that persist, or are it and others like it exceptions to the rule?

Is there really an argument to be made that day-to-day policing has changed significantly to help bring communities of color and the police department closer together despite some high-profile tragedies?

Under de Blasio’s five-and-a-half-year tenure, policing and the criminal justice system in New York City have undoubtedly changed. Some key data points paint a clear picture. But to many advocates and critics, the mayor has fallen far short of his lofty pledges and boasts of reform; and other data points undermine de Blasio’s claims.

Arrests, summonses, stop-and-frisks, and complaints of officer misconduct are all trending downward, meaning fewer and less punitive interactions between police officers and New Yorkers.

But any of the progress that may indicate is often juxtaposed, and for some completely undermined, by disproportionate racial impacts and repeated and public instances of flagrant violations by officers that seem to go unpunished, sending the signal that while officers enforce the law, they themselves are above it.

“There were multiple officers involved in murdering Eric Garner and there were multiple officers involved in trying to cover it up,” said Yul-san Liem, co-director of the Justice Committee at Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition group, at the August 14 rally. “And all of those officers represent a threat to public safety. Mayor de Blasio, if any of those officers are not held accountable, you have not done your job, and you cannot speak Eric Garner's name without hanging your head in shame.”

But de Blasio regularly invokes Eric Garner’s name, citing his death as a turning point for the department’s efforts towards true accountability. He said as much on Monday at City Hall.

“When you look at everything that has happened, literally from just days after this tragedy until today, the retraining of this entire police force – retraining 36,000 officers regularly to deescalate so that exact incident would not happen again; the implicit bias training, because we're all humans with biases and it needs to be weeded out and the only way to do that is to help people understand those biases so they can act on them. The body cameras – if you go back to that day in 2014 none of those things were here. It's a very different department.”

Numbers vs Sentiments
“Anyone who says that everything we’ve been doing for five years to stop another tragedy doesn’t matter, I think they absolutely do not understand the needs of the people of our city who have told me repeatedly that policing has changed,” de Blasio said in a recent appearance on NY1’s Inside City Hall with host Errol Louis. The mayor had just come off a debate appearance in the Democratic presidential race, where protestors heckled him on live television and called for Pantaleo’s firing.

“I’ve talked to people in communities all over New York City. They say their lives are different because their children are not being stopped. I’ve talked to young men of color who say their lives are different because they’re not being stopped. And folks who say their relationship with police is profoundly different because we retrained every police officer after that tragedy of Eric Garner, and we did not just stand idly by,” de Blasio continued. “We retrained every police officer to change the nature of policing and policing is different today in New York City. So I’m not caught up in the words of a few activists. I care about 8.6 million people and their lives have to change. And we’ve devoted ourselves to making sure it is a very different world than the one it was five years ago.”

It’s true that on the metrics, the NYPD is no longer defined by the unconstitutional practice of stop-and-frisk policing that peaked during the Bloomberg era. Stops fell from a high of 685,724 in 2011 to 11,008 in 2018, according to NYPD data.

De Blasio has repeatedly said his administration “ended” the practice but the number of stops had already dropped dramatically in Bloomberg’s last years in office and has continued to decrease under de Blasio, though it has not been completely eliminated. Advocates and experts point out that stops still disproportionately affect people of color and note that de Blasio can hardly take credit for what was accomplished through concerted activism, public pressure, and litigation (even if he was part of the chorus before being elected mayor). They also point to repeated reports by a federal court-appointed monitor with oversight of the NYPD that have noted that officers were undercounting street stops.

On arrests and summonses, too, the city has shown significant shifts under de Blasio, part of the picture he paints when arguing that he’s a police reformer.

In 2018, there were a total of 246,781 arrests, down from 388,368 in 2013.

In 2018, there were a total of 89,908 criminal summonses (which mean a written citation and court date but not a trip to jail) issued, down from 424,883 in 2013. (There have been 44,382 issued through June 30 this year.)

In 2018, the NYPD handed out 54,774 civil summonses for low-level offenses that often can be dealt with as criminal or civil violations, and the city has moved toward civil based on legislation passed by the City Council in 2016. (In the first six months of 2019, only 14,908 civil summonses were issued, compared with 26,782 over the same time last year.)

All this, while most major felony crimes, including murder, have dropped during de Blasio’s tenure, continuing a decades-long trend in New York City.

Use of guns by NYPD officers appears to be down. In 2017, the latest year of data available from the NYPD, there were 52 firearms discharge incidents, down from 81 in 2013; 19 individuals were shot and injured or killed by officers in 2017, down from 25 in 2013; and total shots fired were 242, down from 248. (The NYPD now tracks all uses of force – earlier, only firearm discharges were tracked.)

The Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), a quasi-independent agency of mostly mayoral appointees that monitors and investigates complaints of police misconduct and abuse of power, received 4,745 complaints within its jurisdiction in 2018, down from 5,410 in 2013. And that decrease comes amid a heightened environment around police misconduct, in part spurred by incidents like Garner’s death, the Black Lives Matter movement, and more. (Through July of this year, the Board received 3,377 complaints.)

In February, the NYPD completed the initial rollout of its body camera program to roughly 20,000 members of the force, with an additional 4,000 set to be given to specialized units by this month. While the cameras are said to increase transparency and accountability for officers, there are major questions around the rules for how footage is released and used.

Under O’Neill, the NYPD’s focus has been to rebuild trust through neighborhood policing, a program that assigns officers to regularly patrol specific sectors within precincts to grow familiarity with community members. Officers also participate in community meetings to hear directly from locals about the issues affecting their neighborhoods. The program has been rolled out in all precincts citywide.

“Policing in New York has never been more fair or effective,” said Alfred Baker, an NYPD spokesperson, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “Officers on the ground are building foundations of trust within our neighborhoods while department leaders are working to meet ever higher standards of accountability. Today, the NYPD continues to drive down crime and serve as a national model for the idea that safety is a shared responsibility and that the police and the community must work together to ensure people are safe and that they feel safe. But our important work continues, as our collective vision for sustained success on all fronts evolves.”

Alongside neighborhood policing, the department has also committed to what it calls “precision policing,” tracking crime patterns and troubled neighborhoods where they can send additional resources and personnel, and focusing on gangs, crews, hot-spots, and individuals known to be repeat offenders. That, O’Neill argues, allows the department to target the most serious drivers of crime and the few thousand individuals who commit most of the city’s violent crime, instead of stopping and frisking tens or hundreds of thousands of mostly black and Latino young men.

O’Neill has repeatedly touted the success of precision policing of crime hotspots and gangs, as well as the neighborhood policing program, which he has said has led to a paradigm shift in how cops interact with communities, something de Blasio has made a mantra.

Following the announcement of the NYPD judge’s decision in the Pantaleo case on August 2, de Blasio reiterated the point at a news conference at City Hall.

“For the last five years, our mission has been to fundamentally change the nature of policing in New York City,” he said. “After the death of Eric Garner, everything was reevaluated. The entire police force was retrained – 36,000 officers retrained to deescalate conflict, to understand the implicit bias that we all carry with us, to ensure it would not interfere with their duty. The approach to the community is entirely different today – and we had to weed out the distance and the separation that was the norm of the past, and, through neighborhood policing, actually create a dynamic where our officers and community members got to know each other as human beings, where people felt they were on the same side, working toward a common goal.”

But neither the mayor nor the commissioner have offered proof that sentiments are changing on the ground, and there is only corollary evidence that neighborhood policing is having any impact on crime. A long promised survey of communities has yet to be released – in May O’Neill said the surveys were ongoing. A separate study of the program by the RAND Corporation began in 2018 and will only be fully completed by mid-2021 for public release. The NYPD is meant to receive preliminary findings from that study this year.

A March 2018 Quinnipiac University poll showed that 52% of voters approved of de Blasio's handling of the Police Department, while 37% disapproved. Across racial lines, that approval varied – 61% of black residents gave their approval, while only 50% of white residents and 48% of Hispanic residents felt the same. An earlier poll, from July 2017, showed that only 41% of New Yorkers approved of the way de Blasio was handling police-community relations, and 52% disapproved. Again there were racial differences – approval was 55% among black New Yorkers, 34% for white voters, and 39% for Hispanic voters.

“The mayor is more concerned with public relations and talking points,” said Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, in a recent phone interview. “Even the conversation around quote-unquote neighborhood policing, much of it is really a hugely funded PR game right now. The fact that there's something called neighborhood policing, or the fact that there are some officers called NCOs [neighborhood coordination officers] is not equivalent to fundamental change or improvement in policing. And there's no evidence that they're pointing to that that [improvement] exists.”

Advocates don't seem to want to give an inch in acknowledging the areas where there appears to be progress toward goals shared with de Blasio. Some like Kang argue that the issues with the department are more ingrained, and that the lack of accountability encourages a culture of abuse of power that cannot be checked through simply retraining officers. They say that the NYPD needs to end broken windows policing entirely, that police should not be the solution to community issues, and that a focus on socioeconomic factors would more greatly contribute to both safety and increased trust.

Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, and a prominent critic of broken windows policing, said the two metrics for improved policing are the number of punitive interactions between police and the public and the level of abuse during those interactions.

On the first, the administration has shown much success. “Stop-and-frisk encounters are of course down astronomically, misdemeanor arrests are down, overall arrests are down. So those are very real positive metrics,” he said.

On the second metric, Vitale said, the results are more mixed. “We continue to see a lot of very abusive interactions between police and the public,” he said. “The videos continue to show not so much that people are getting killed [like] Eric Garner, but just tons of videos that show police needlessly escalating because they're being driven by this idea that if they don't show that they are the superior force in every interaction, that somehow civilization will become unglued.”

He pointed to the recent incidents where officers were being doused with water in the streets and chose not to make any arrests. “The department's policy response was to go out and get these people, to use force to arrest them, and to ramp up the idea that what's important here is police authority. So that when push came to shove, any idea about neighborhood policing or de-escalation went right out the window,” Vitale said.

He had particular criticism for the mayor’s talking points on retraining officers. “All this talk about training is smoking mirrors. This is political cover and it's made absolutely no difference,” Vitale argued. He had five concrete suggestions to improve the state of affairs: “getting the police out of the mental health business,” decriminalizing sex work, aggressive support for marijuana legalization, getting police out of schools, and dialing back on gang policing.

If the advocates believe the mayor has let the NYPD run roughshod, there are also those who believe he’s completely stifled the police force. Republican elected officials and the uniformed unions say the mayor is anti-NYPD, and accuse him of kowtowing to the demands of advocates. “I think folks in media and advocates tend to focus on statistics that justify the narrative they want,” said City Council Member Joe Borelli, a Staten Island Republican, in an interview outside City Council chambers. “When you look at the number of confrontational shootings the NYPD does compared to other major city departments, it's actually astounding how reserved and professional our police officers are, and they get no credit for that whatsoever. And the left wants to paint them as these jackbooted oppressors.”

“What more level of accountability could there be when there are already five or six agencies and offices that an individual officer must be accountable to?,” Borelli asked rhetorically.

The mayor and the police commissioner have been similarly and repeatedly criticized by Pat Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents 24,000 rank-and-file police officers. Following the Pantaleo decision, Lynch said in a statement, “With this decision, Commissioner O’Neill has opened the door for politicians to dictate the outcome of every single NYPD disciplinary proceeding, without any regard for the facts of the case or police officers’ due process rights. He will wake up tomorrow to discover that the cop-haters are still not satisfied, but it will be too late. The damage is already done. The NYPD will remain rudderless and frozen, and Commissioner O’Neill will never be able to bring it back.”

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A failure of accountability and transparency
For advocates and elected officials, however, there’s a disconnect between some of the data and the community efforts and what they see as an almost complete lack of accountability for erring officers. “I think they've done a relatively good job at trying to build those bridges back and really trying to intimately get into communities to know people,” said Queens City Council Member Donovan Richards, a Democrat and chair of the public safety committee, in an interview at City Hall. “Where the failure has come has come on accountability, and transparency and accountability are still the areas that they struggle on.”

Richards cited, for instance, the NYPD’s facial recognition, DNA, and gang databases, which sweep thousands of New Yorkers into the system, seemingly in violation of their civil rights. And of course, the death of Eric Garner.

“Those are all glaring failures that I feel are undermining all of the progress they’re really trying to make in other places. You look at the Garner case, it's just a shining example of how far we have to go to make sure that the department is truly holding people accountable,” said Richards, who has been among those saying de Blasio should have moved to see Pantaleo fired long ago.

In all, he said the mayor’s record has been a “mixed bag,” which has only served to increase mistrust with the public. “You can't train people or legislate common decency. You can't train and legislate people to not pull babies apart from their moms in a dangerous fashion. I mean, how do you legislate somebody not to choke somebody to death over a low-level offense?”

The NYPD has indeed taken steps to improve its disciplinary practices, though it is unclear what impact they will have. In February, O’Neill announced the department would implement the reform recommendations of an independent blue ribbon panel – put together after a Buzzfeed News investigation last year showed hundreds of NYPD employees kept their jobs despite committing acts that should have led to termination – which included speeding up disciplinary adjudications, studying the creation of a disciplinary matrix, more strongly enforcing action against offices who make false statements, and greater transparency, among other measures.

And after the Justice Department announced that it would not file federal charges against Officer Pantaleo, the mayor said the city would never again wait to act on police misconduct while federal investigators make decisions in such cases.

Some police reform advocates take a much harsher view of the mayor’s efforts. For one, they point out that arrests have been falling because of changes in laws and policies that the mayor and commissioner have repeatedly resisted in many cases.

There is the Criminal Justice Reform Act, spearheaded by former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and passed by the Council in 2016, which created civil penalties for several low-level criminal offenses, and the Right to Know Act, which mandates that officers provide identification during street stops and let suspects know that they can refuse a stop when there is no evidence leading the officers to presume a crime may be about to happen or recently happened. In both cases, the mayor and police department had to be cajoled to support a version of the legislation that could feasibly pass the Council floor and not be vetoed by the mayor.

More recently, when the 2019 Charter Revision Commission was considering a proposal to strengthen the CCRB, the mayor’s office worked behind the scenes unsuccessfully to prevent the measure from making it onto the November general election ballot.

“What we've seen is police accountability and transparency going backwards under de Blasio in multiple areas,” said Kang. She cited the many “egregious cases” of police misconduct, many of them caught on tape or revealed in the press, that have gone unpunished. That serves to discourage New Yorkers from filing complaints against cops, she said, both for fear of retaliation or concern that their complaints will go nowhere. “The message is sent to New Yorkers is that the department and the mayor are not going to take police who harm people, they're not going to take that seriously,” she said. “They're not going to discipline officers, they’re not going to fire officers, they’re not going to protect New Yorkers from officers who are abusive.”

Kang also criticized how opaque the de Blasio administration has been with regards to police discipline, referring to Section 50-a of the State Civil Rights code, which shields officers’ disciplinary records from public disclosure. Prior to the de Blasio administration, limited disciplinary records were made available to the public and members of the press. But under him, the department reinterpreted it – arguing that they had inadvertently been breaking the law for decades – and closed what was a very small window into officer misconduct allegations.

De Blasio and O’Neill subsequently said they wanted the state law changed to allow more disclosure, but they do not appear to have made a serious push on the issue and nothing passed during this year’s legislative session in Albany. Notably though, the NYPD no longer invokes 50-a to keep body camera footage secret.

“[T]he expansion and manipulation of the state police secrecy law 50-a to really protect abuse of officers, hide police misconduct, hide trends of lack of discipline when cops do abuse or brutalize or sexually assault and harm New Yorkers is a huge issue. And the De Blasio administration has actually been worse than prior administrations, including Republican administrations in terms of the level of secrecy around this,” Kang said.

There are, of course, other practices that have rankled critics. The NYPD’s crackdown on fare evasion, which effectively criminalizes poverty, and on e-bikes, which disproportionately hurts delivery workers who tend to be immigrants (many of them undocumented) of color.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, in an interview at City Hall, gave the mayor credit for improved metrics: more safety while reducing arrests, summonses, and use of force. “But when it comes to accountability and transparency, we might be worse at this moment in time,” he said. “He ran on the backs of these stories of black and brown families, and to be having to fight certain fights is nonsensical...There are some conversations that are way too difficult than it should be for a mayor who ran on these issues.”

Chris Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a phone interview, that for de Blasio, “Maybe the two big opposite ends of the spectrum are stop-and-frisk on one hand, and police officer discipline and accountability on the other.”

Dunn did not credit the mayor entirely for the reduction in stop-and-frisk, which, as Kang and others noted, was largely because of litigation initiated by advocates, which led a judge to rule that the NYPD had used the practice unconstitutionally by virtually indiscriminately stopping so many young men of color. But, Dunn said, “The mayor deserves a lot of criticism for his role in perpetuating a system where there's no transparency or accountability when it comes to police misconduct...He has not been a leader here in the city when it comes to police reform. Now, there are circumstances or instances in which he has gone along or been pulled along. But I don't think there are areas where he's actually led a reform initiative.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note - This story has been updated.

Note - This story has been updated to note that Sergeant Adonis pleaded guilty to departmental charges and will no longer face trial. 

Top Charter School Advocate on the Controversial Sector’s Strengths and Weaknesses


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(photo: the governor's office)


James Merriman has been involved in the charter school movement in New York since its inception 20 years ago, first as the general counsel for the Charter Schools Institute and now, for the last 12 years, as CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, a leading charter school advocacy and resource group.

“My parents were both professors. I thought I was going to be a professor. It’s all anybody did in my house,” Merriman said in a recent interview. “And the notion of being involved in education and giving all children the ability to participate fully in our civic, political, and economic life is very important to me. It was then, and it’s what still motivates me today.”

As such, Merriman has been in the middle of many policy and political fights over the years as the controversial charter school sector — public schools that are privately run — of the city’s education system has grown significantly. There were roughly 119,000 students enrolled in 235 charter schools for the 2018-2019 school year, good for 66% growth in student enrollment since 2014, while enrollment in the city’s traditional public schools has declined.

But while he has a prominent role in often-tense education debates, Merriman strikes a calm, stoic demeanor, tries to be a consensus builder, and is one of few top charter sector figures readily willing to acknowledge charters’ shortcomings.

Reflecting on the two-decade charter school movement in New York, Merriman said that originally the schools were to be “labs of innovations,” but have expanded beyond that as they succeeded, and now form a “parallel alternative” to the traditional public school system in the city. Merriman discussed the sector’s trajectory, reasons he believes New York City charter schools have been successful, and how the schools can and should improve during an appearance on the latest episode of the What’s the [Data] Point? podcast from Gotham Gazette and Citizens Budget Commission.

Merriman said at first the charter school movement was so “upstart” and “revolutionary” that at the time he did not think they would grow beyond that.

“I think, though, as time went on, as they succeeded, as parents demanded more of them, as educators wanted to start more charters, they’ve become a significant part,” Merriman said. “Obviously [WTDP’s] number of the day represents about 10% of students in New York City. We are larger than Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester combined by a significant amount. We’re bigger than Denver in total students.”

As the future of charter schools in the city is somewhat more uncertain than in past years, Merriman weighed in on several key ongoing debates, including about student enrollment and discipline, teacher turnover, the appropriate size of the sector, why charter school students perform so well on state tests, and more.

“There are some people who would say we should not even be the size we are,” Merriman said. “And then there are people who say the natural growth is until parents stop wanting more charter schools.”

The goal of the charter school sector is not to become a replacement to the traditional public school system or even to make up half of the city’s public schools, Merriman said, but to provide parents good choices for their children.

The intent is to grow until there are no longer wait lists, he said, welcoming the idea that traditional district schools improve to the point that there is no longer such demand for charters.

“I wouldn’t say the goal is any specific number,” Merriman said. “The goal is to reach a point where we no longer have parents who aren’t getting a seat if they want one. I don’t know what that number is. I’m going to tell you, though, it’s well, well short of 50%. I just don’t see that at all in any realistic thing. Lots and lots of parents are happy with their district school they’re sending their child to.”

Applications for charter school seats have far surpassed the number of those available, with tens of thousands on wait lists. However, no more charters can be issued as New York City hit the state-imposed cap this past March and legislators declined to work with Governor Andrew Cuomo, a long-time charter school supporter, to lift the cap before the end of the legislative session in June. Charter schools are still growing, however, given that many continue to add new grades — the charter sector is predominantly elementary schools, and schools often build out over years.

Merriman said the charter school center and its allies will continue to try to convince the state Legislature to raise the cap. One of the biggest opponents of charter school growth is Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has been sharply critical of the sector, especially Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz, who is often the face and voice of charter schools in New York given that her network makes up 14% of charter students in the city. De Blasio has said he is opposed to raising the charter cap.

Charter schools are concentrated in Central Brooklyn, Upper Manhattan, and the South Bronx, Merriman said, generally where there are many students of color and low-income students, and struggling traditional district schools. Merriman said about 82% of charter school students are low-income. Around 90% of charter school students enrolled in 2017-2018 were black or Hispanic, according to the Charter School Center.

“The ethos was that we would help those students who are in need and who are at risk of academic failure and who, historically, have not been well-served,” Merriman said. “And so that’s why you see those concentrations there.”

Charter school students have far outperformed district students on statewide assessments, according to an analysis of State Education Department data by the Charter School Center. In 2018, around 60% of charter school students scored proficiently in math assessments compared to 43% of district students.

Black and Hispanic students in charter schools also outperform those in public school as 30% of black charter school students scored at Level 4 proficiency (the highest level) in math compared to only 8% of those in traditional public schools.

Merriman said the test score success in charter schools comes from “what is being taught in the classroom” and that principals are more focused on academics than paperwork, often hiring a top aide to handle compliance and operations, and give robust teacher feedback, which then benefits students.

“While test scores aren’t everything, and state tests aren’t everything, they’re not nothing, either,” Merriman said. “We need to make sure that our kids have basic skills in the early grades or there is no way that we are going to be able to do complex math and English language, arts and history down the road.”

Merriman acknowledged that there are still ways the charter school system can improve. As the conversation turned to teacher turnover, which the Manhattan Institute noted in a 2018 report is higher in charter schools than traditional public schools, Merriman said teachers leave charter schools because of the difficulty of the work and how much is expected of them.

Merriman said some schools are trying to figure out how to keep a sense of urgency and focus while working with teachers (though he didn’t specify how) who may leave after 3 to 5 years due to the difficulty of the work. He said, though, that the larger networks may see the turnover rate as more of a model than an issue. Most charter schools do not have unionized teaching staff.

“As long as they think kids are doing well, if that means that most people can’t hack it in their view, well, that’s the way it’ll be,” Merriman said. “I think others think probably they’re not going to have people who work 20 or 30 years with them, that they’re trying to make sure they move from an average of say three-and-a-half years, ideally, to six or seven years.”

Some have also criticized charter schools for harsh “no excuses” discipline practices, which means harsh discipline and high suspension rates for their mostly black and Hispanic students, leading networks like KIPP to announce policy changes. Merriman said among charter schools there has already been a “reckoning” that discipline policies need to be changed, but that not all of the work has been done yet.

“People have revamped not just discipline codes, because I don’t think that’s really the issue,” Merriman said, “They’ve revamped how they think about kids. The shift, if you will, is I think in the past the notion was the children will fit the program. I think there’s a reckoning and an understanding we need to make sure the program fits the kids where they are.”

LISTEN to the full interview with James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center

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by Samantha Handler, Gotham Gazette
     

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As New NYCHA Chair Takes Over, the Future of Public Housing Hangs in the Balance


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Chair Gregory Russ visiting a NYCHA complex (photo: @NYCHA)


“These first few months of our work have revealed NYCHA as an organization fraught with serious problems in structure, culture, and direction, and perhaps even worse,” wrote Bart Schwartz, the new federal monitor of the city’s public housing authority, in his first progress report, released July 22.

Three weeks later, this past Monday, Gregory Russ arrived in Manhattan for his first day of work as NYCHA’s new Chair and CEO, with an enormous task in front of him.

NYCHA’s short- and long-term futures have been complicated for some time. It’s the largest public housing authority in the country, with more than 400,000 residents, struggles to break even with annual operating expenses, is tens of billions of dollars behind in infrastructure spending for a state of good repair, and plagued by lead paint, mold, broken heating systems and elevators, and other calamities.

Until Russ, NYCHA hadn’t had a permanent leader in 16 months, during which time Schwartz was named federal monitor through a January 31 agreement among Mayor Bill de Blasio, federal housing Secretary Ben Carson, federal prosecutors, and a judge.

While de Blasio has taken more ownership of and put more resources into NYCHA than his recent predecessors, crises at the sprawling, 316-development, 176,000-unit public housing authority have spiraled. Federal and state help has been limited, and, in combination with what the city is doing, is nowhere near meeting the need.

Recognition has set in more recently that drastic measures are needed, though it is unclear where all of the more than $30 billion estimated need to get NYCHA apartments and complexes into a state of good repair will come from.

Russ takes over as the latest in several major changes and announcements toward a better future for NYCHA and its residents, but also amid a great deal of uncertainty and a constant drumbeat of headlines about waste, mismanagement, inefficiency, and need. His hiring comes after a lead paint scandal broke and multiple announcements by the de Blasio administration and NYCHA about plans to deal with it; the release of the “NYCHA 2.0” plan by de Blasio that calls for fairly aggressive steps like “infill” private housing development to raise needed capital revenue for the crumbling housing authority; the near-receivership deal with the Department of Housing and Urban Developmentin New York; and Schwartz’s appointment.

Russ, formerly head of the public housing authorities in several cities, including most recently Minneapolis, is now undertaking what is likely his biggest professional challenge.

“It’s probably one of the most difficult jobs in public administration in New York City and maybe even the country,” said Nicholas Dagen Bloom, professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and a NYCHA scholar.

The goals, mandates, and timelines already in place as Russ begins his work form a somewhat confusing mix, all layered on top of the desperate need, with many thousands of tenants living in squalor and far too many units on the verge of being uninhabitable.

The combination of reforms the city has made with NYCHA over the last several years; NYCHA 2.0; other promises by the mayor and his appointees; federal requirements; and Schwartz’s recently-begun work form the basis of what Russ has to work with.

In an online message posted on NYCHA’s website, Russ promised “real and substantial changes” in order to turn the page at the housing authority.

“My mission is simple: fix residents’ homes today and make NYCHA stronger for the coming generations,” Russ wrote. “One of my top priorities is to meet with NYCHA residents and staff across the city to hear about how we can best work together to make progress,” he wrote.

As Russ starts his tenure, he and Schwartz appear to be conducting similar fact-finding and get-to-know-you endeavors, with questions looming about how well they will work together, along with HUD officials and others, to bring relief to NYCHA tenants and repair the nation’s largest public housing stock for adequate and comfortable future use by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

The HUD Agreement
Federal Monitor Bart Schwartz, a former federal prosecutor and currently chair of investigations firm Guidepost Solutions, was named monitor on March 1. He will be overseeing NYCHA’s progress towards deadlines laid out in an agreement with HUD, federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, NYCHA, and the de Blasio administration announced January 31.

Schwartz, whose still-unknown budget (reportedly he submitted an initial $20 million bill) will be paid by the city, is required to release essentially a public progress report on NYCHA’s compliance with the agreement each quarter, the first of which was released July 22. That report, which laid out the extent to which NYCHA is following the agreement particularly with regard to lead, mold, and elevator inspections, is highly critical of NYCHA, pointing to limits of its progress, describing “cascading putrid liquid” in one development, insufficient plans, and “daunting” deadlines.

“He is there to hold us to account,” then-NYCHA Interim Chair Kathryn Garcia said in a May 7 City Council hearing. The implementation of a federal monitor was widely welcomed by critics of NYCHA. Russ will have to establish a positive working relationship with the the monitor, a position which will be filled for at least five years and currently held by Schwartz.

Garcia and Schwartz butted heads over the progress of arguably the biggest focus of NYCHA, SDNY, and HUD’s agreement: the testing for and abatement of lead in NYCHA’s public housing stock.

In a pointed memo, Schwartz criticized Garcia’s testimony to the City Council’s Committee on Public Housing in the May 7 hearing, saying it “omitted material details about lead paint issues that are required to be addressed now and in the future by the NYCHA, and thereby may have resulted in a misleading impression being given to City Council members and the public about how these issues are being addressed.”

Per the agreement, NYCHA is required to test for lead paint in all NYCHA units built before 1978 (the year lead paint was made illegal) and all units NYCHA believes are occupied or routinely visited by children under six years old, who are the most vulnerable to lead paint poisoning and its effects on development. NYCHA plans to test 135,000 units with x-ray technology called XRF testing by the end of 2020.

During a press conference announcing the testing on the day it began, April 15, de Blasio said, “for the first time ever, we’re going into 135,000 NYCHA apartments to eradicate lead exposure. This aggressive new testing plan will help make New York the healthiest and fairest big city in America.”

It appears the authority is already behind.

The $88 million initiative is supposed to inspect 5,000 to 7,000 units a month. In total in the first three months of the initiative -- per data released August 8th -- only 9,475 units were tested, which is 7% of the total goal. At that rate, at the end of 2020 NYCHA will have tested roughly 47,000 apartments, 35% of the goal.

Of the 4,645 test results received from those inspections, 3,494 came back positive.

According to Schwartz’s report, “we note that our interviews have indicated that NYCHA lacks a comprehensive strategic policy to address the many issues surrounding lead-based paint.”

Longer-term, NYCHA is required to abate all lead-based paint in 50% of apartment units that contain it and remove all lead paint in 20 years.

NYCHA is required per the agreement to release action plans for how to deal with lead, mold, heat and hot water, elevators, and pests and waste. The action plan for lead didn’t cut it, according to Schwartz: “NYCHA’s Certification and Corrective Action Plan is a frank admission of an unacceptable level of deficiencies, from the quality of the interim controls to the number of units that have not been cleared.”

Garcia, in a return memo to Monitor Schwartz, acknowledged the ambition of the deadlines and said full compliance should not be expected immediately.

The agreement also lays out ambitious deadlines for addressing heating improvements, mold removal, elevator outages, and rat and roach reduction.

Compliance with elevator deadlines -- by January 2022, 70% of buildings with more than one elevator can have at most one instance per year where both elevators are out of service -- doesn’t seem likely. “Even with a sufficient increase in funding,” according to Schwartz, “NYCHA cannot simply engage in a capital program of installing a large number of elevators in a short amount of time because there is currently no plan in place to address the global challenges of the elevator portfolio.”

By January 2021, 95% of the times residents submit a verified mold complaint, NYCHA must remove all visible mold in the unit within five business days.

By October 2024, no more than 15% of occupied units can have internal temperatures that fall below the legal limit-- during the day between October 1st and May 31st if outside temperature drops below 55 degrees, internal temperature must be at least 68 degrees Fahrenheit and at least 62 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the night. NYCHA per the agreement will replace or address 500 boilers by 2026.

The rat and roach deadlines, like lead testing, have already proven controversial. The New York Daily News spoke with experts who said the pest control requirements -- NYCHA has three years to reduce the rat population by 50%, mouse population by 40%, and roach population by 40% -- are “nearly impossible to meet without an unlimited budget given the size of NYCHA…and the scope of New York City’s entrenched pest problems.”

During a March 11 oversight hearing, Garcia acknowledged pests are one area where the authority might need more time to develop a plan to meet the deadlines.

Possibly sensing the difficulties of the ambitious deadline, NYCHA announced in July a doubling the number of developments under de Blasio’s 2017 “Neighborhood Rat Reduction” initiative to decrease the rat population in the city. However, Schwartz doesn’t see this as the best tact, calling it “too narrowly implemented.”

“Certain NYCHA developments visited by the Monitor Team that are not located within one of the Mayor’s rat reduction zones have horrific pest infestation conditions (including rats). It is inadequate for NYCHA to largely bootstrap its rat reduction efforts to the Mayor’s rat reduction program. NYCHA’s rat reduction efforts must be more expansive across its entire portfolio in order to eradicate this problem.”

At this point in the Agreement, NYCHA is required to inspect the grounds and common areas every day for each of its buildings for trash and pests.

“Culture of Disengagement and Dysfunction”
Scrutiny of Russ has already begun, especially after the city missed two deadlines before naming him leader of the entity tasked with providing good housing and other services to an estimated 500,000 people in NYCHA public housing. Russ will reportedly earn a salary of just over $400,000, making him the highest paid city official in New York, and plans to regularly return to Minneapolis, where his family is remaining full-time, at least initially.

Along with the salary and travel, the choice of Russ was questioned given that in Minneapolis he managed a little more than 6,000 public housing units, compared to NYCHA’s roughly 175,000 units. However, the list of people with experience managing even close to the size of NYCHA’s portfolio is quite small.

As he attempts to save public housing in New York City, in part by meeting federal deadlines, Russ will have to significantly change NYCHA’s leadership and overall management culture, which have been heavily criticized for some time, especially over the last few years.

In a recent op-ed in Gotham Gazette, former commissioner of the city Department of Investigation Mark Peters and former first deputy commissioner of DOI Lesley Brovner wrote that the investigations into NYCHA that they oversaw revealed a “systemic culture of failing to take responsibility.”

Schwartz, in his initial report, wrote in regard to regional asset managers that NYCHA employs a strategy of “[moving] people around so that no one knows the history of the development in which they land and no one takes responsibility as they are new to the site.”

NYCHA’s leadership structure might be changing: Schwartz was required by the agreement to hire an outside consulting firm (he hired KPMG) to construct an organizational plan to “examine NYCHA’s systems, policies, procedures, and management and personnel structures, and make recommendations to the City, NYCHA, and the Monitor to improve the areas examined.”

The agreement required NYCHA to establish a Compliance Department, an Environmental Health and Safety Department, and a Quality Assurance Unit by mid-February. All three departments were created on time, but there were issues, according to Schwartz. The monitor is “concerned…about the effectiveness of these departments,” and even rejected two proposed heads, as they lacked “requisite qualifications and experience.”

In his online opening message, Russ said, “I’d like to remind staff that they should cooperate with the monitor’s team as we work together to achieve our shared goals. Because the wellbeing of our residents and employees is our primary focus, I’d also like to make clear that improper practices or conduct will not be tolerated at the Authority.”

NYCHA 2.0
Few if any of the requirements in the HUD deal or any of the many essential renovations at NYCHA complexes and apartments will be completed without significant financial investment. As of 2017, NYCHA projected that $32 billion is needed to properly fund the capital needs of its housing stock. Incoming Chair Russ has said it’s probably up to $45 billion now, but in his initial open letter to NYCHA employees, Russ wrote $32 billion.

“Without dramatic action, up to 90 percent of NYCHA’s 176,000 units of public housing could deteriorate to the point at which they are no longer cost-effective to repair by 2027,” according to Sean Campion, a researcher at the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), in testimony to the City Council’s Committee on Public Housing on November 15 of last year.

According to a CBC report, the average cost to repair a single NYCHA apartment is $181,000. If NYCHA apartments were to deteriorate at the same rate they have been, by 2027 90% of the authority’s housing stock could be designated as “very high cost” to repair, around $250,000- $300,000 each; and 8,000 units could need repairs exceeding the cost to replace the unit outright with brand new construction.

Running simultaneously with the changes spelled out by HUD, NYCHA will continue the roll out and implementation of NYCHA 2.0, first released by de Blasio and NYCHA officials in December, and its aggressive plan to resolve $24 billion in capital needs over 10 years.

NYCHA 2.0 accelerates the goals and initiatives of de Blasio’s previous plan, Next Generation NYCHA, raising questions about why the mayor and NYCHA leaders did not pursue a more assertive plan from the get-go when de Blasio took over City Hall and NYCHA in 2014. Next Generation NYCHA was released in May 2015.

The new plan has three tranches: One, converting public housing (Section 9 housing) into public-private partnerships (Section 8 housing) using the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) process, which allows for private management of NYCHA complexes and an influx of revenue to the authority for leasing such rights; Two, a significant “infill” program to allow leasing of NYCHA space for private housing development, some of which will be market-rate and some “affordable” rentals; And three, selling NYCHA air rights.

Using the PACT program -- the city name for RAD conversions -- NYCHA will essentially lease buildings and developments to private companies who will manage public housing, investing in the housing projects, collecting rent, and running the facilities. NYCHA plans to use this process for 62,000 units which would address around $12.8 billion in capital needs over 10 years, according to the plan. The agreement with HUD states HUD’s support for continuing the RAD program but not necessarily expanding it (HUD must approve all RAD conversions).

When asked about the biggest unknown for NYCHA, Professor Bloom said it is continuing these conversions at an increasing scale. A major upside of the RAD conversions is it transfers the responsibility and cost of the upkeep of the units to private companies (which are often free of the cumbersome labor union work rules that NYCHA leadership and others have found frustrating). The money NYCHA receives from the conversions goes directly towards repairs and renovations in the converted developments.

Chair Russ is a big proponent of RAD. In Minneapolis, he put every single public housing unit through RAD conversions and would surely welcome an even more ambitious goal than 62,000 RAD units in the city.

There have been nine PACT/RAD conversions, two of them recently announced in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Plus, the largest single-site RAD conversion, totalling $560 million in renovations (partly paid by FEMA funds for Superstorm Sandy recovery), at Ocean Side Apartments in Rockaway, Queens was unveiled in June.

According to Bloom, PACT conversions can be lucrative for private companies as well as NYCHA: “There’s some real upside to taking on a NYCHA project that most people don’t realize,” Bloom said. “Many have significant capital investment over the years, more than people realize, they’re solid buildings…they’re fully-tenanted, they come with Section 8 investment, which is a federal guarantee, they’re not required to pay normal city property taxes, they can borrow or develop vehicles to renovate the projects, and they’re also in pretty good locations.”

The second piece of NYCHA 2.0 is even more controversial than PACT/RAD conversions, which are themselves criticized by some as “privatization” of public housing.

Using infill development, what is considered “underutilized” land, often parking lots, in the often sprawling public housing projects, is leased to private developers to build housing. The housing that will come to given NYCHA complexes will vary in terms of the balance of market-rate and “affordable” units (typically the more market-rate the more revenue for NYCHA), with proceeds of the lease agreements going to NYCHA and investments in the developments home to the new infill housing.

In NYCHA 2.0, the city estimates $2 billion in revenue for NYCHA from infill development in around five initial developments. But, it is unclear if the city can meet the pace it expects given how controversial infill can be -- private developers were recently forced to restart the community engagement process of planned infill development at Holmes Towers on the Upper East Side. The proposal would have built a 50-story building on the site of a playground, with half the units market-rate rentals, more than some residents and local officials like Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and City Council Member Ben Kallos would have preferred.

“To get the type of money to basically build a new development that includes an affordable component and has the market-rate to fully renovate the nearby development,” says Bloom, “it has to be more market-rate. The residents and advocates don’t want that. That’s the challenge.”

When asked about infill development on the Max & Murphy show on WBAI radio, outgoing Chair Garcia said in late May, “we want to maximize the money that we can get in order to do what is a pretty massive capital need. That being said, I can completely understand why residents might be anxious.”

“We really don’t have a lot of other options in terms of the incredible need,” she continued, “and I think this is a way to take funding or value from campuses and do two things: make sure residents do well, and increase the supply of housing and affordable housing in the city which of course is always in dire need.”

If residents decide to back an infill development in their own backyard, 100% of the revenue from the project goes directly to that development. However, the more money for repairs means more market-rate apartments, which can be unpopular with residents who fear broader gentrification of their neighborhoods.

According to an October 2018 CBC report, “developers would pay 50 percent less for a project with a 20 percent affordability set aside and 86 percent less for a project with a 50 percent affordable set aside.”

“Stricter requirements to produce greater amounts of affordable housing make the land less valuable to developers, and hence, generate less revenue for NYCHA,” the report states.

Infill development can lead to innovative architecture, as development plans must navigate what can be tricky underutilized lots of land. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and the American Institute of Architects New York launched an international competition to find architects to embrace the unique challenge of infill development. HPD may designate some or all of the five finalists, announced in May, to further develop their proposals into affordable housing projects.

The final part of the city’s 2.0 plan to fund NYCHA capital needs is selling air rights. NYCHA estimates it has 80 million square feet of unused air rights, some of which it will utilize to generate $1 billion in capital repair needs. During a December press conference announcing NYCHA 2.0, then-Deputy Mayor of Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen said the city is “conducting a more thorough analysis as to where there are available air rights and sites that can receive them.”

Campion, of Citizens Budget Commission, also recommends that the city should integrate NYCHA into its affordable housing plans, which could shift more money to NYCHA units by making it a more central part of the city’s larger affordable housing landscape and planning.

In a recent statement to Gotham Gazette, a spokesperson for NYCHA said, “NYCHA will continue to utilize all NYCHA 2.0 tools in order to secure the funding it needs to improve the quality of residents’ homes and preserve public housing for generations.”

There are several reasons why it’s so important to address NYCHA’s many needs and improve the standard of living across NYCHA developments, while recognizing the important roles NYCHA and its residents play in larger city society, according to the Regional Plan Association. NYCHA residents are vital to the New York City workforce: there are 30,000 NYCHA residents who work in the healthcare industry alone, RPA recently noted. Also, NYCHA provides almost half of all New York City senior centers, over 100 childcare facilities, and many parks and open recreational areas.

Other Funding
While NYCHA 2.0 sets ambitious targets for revenue toward the more than $30 billion in need, more is clearly needed, and major questions remain with regard to executing that plan, as well as other operational goals, management changes, and compliance with federal mandates. NYCHA needs to embark on major elements of 2.0 like infill development while also making basic repairs to individual apartments, replacing boilers and roofs, and much more.

Other outstanding questions include the levels of state and federal funding that NYCHA will receive. The federal government funds two-thirds of NYCHA’s annual operating budget according to Garcia, but that funding is tenuous. Meanwhile, chronic underfunding by the federal government has led to the seemingly insurmountable capital need, according to Professor Bloom.

Controversially, HUD promised no new funds in the agreement, which de Blasio defended by indicating that he had saved the city from entering receivership and pointing to the hostile general outlook from the Trump administration toward public housing. Outgoing interim NYCHA Chair Stanley Brezenoff criticized the deal -- and refused to sign it -- because it included no new federal financial support for NYCHA.

“You can’t starve the system then complain about signs of malnutrition,” said City Council Member Mark Treyger of Brooklyn in the March 11 oversight hearing, in regard to HUD’s funding to NYCHA.

Amid a reelection campaign, Governor Andrew Cuomo last year made a strong show of support for NYCHA, after mostly ignoring it previously. He saw to $250 million additional funds allocated toward NYCHA in 2018, beyond an already committed $300 million to the housing authority. He’s been highly critical of the ongoing lead paint saga, calling NYCHA “fundamentally dysfunctional.”

“This is supposed to be the progressive capital of the nation, New York City. Everybody likes to talk about how progressive they are, how liberal they are, well we’re saying walk the walk don’t talk the talk,” said Cuomo, a former HUD secretary, in a July 2018 press conference. “If you actually care then you step up and you do the right thing by NYCHA after so many years of neglect.”

Cuomo has withheld $450 million of committed state investment, saying he does not trust the money would be spent properly, though it is set to be spent through the state Dormitory Authority working with NYCHA.

“Delivering money to NYCHA is like throwing it out the window,” Cuomo said in April 2018, when he threatened to appoint a state monitor for NYCHA, later opting not to based on federal involvement.

THE CITY reported in April that Cuomo was on the verge of releasing the money for elevator and boiler repairs, but he still does not appear to have done so. The de Blasio administration has agreed to put $2.2 billion in capital expenses towards NYCHA.

Federal, state, and city officials and activists have criticized de Blasio for the multitude of problems that have occurred under his administration, despite the attention and funding he’s provided NYCHA. Some say he waited too long to begin utilizing RAD conversions, and others have questioned his oversight duties in regards to the lead paint scandal, among other problems like heat and hot water outages.

Both de Blasio and Cuomo agree that more federal money is needed, yet the recent HUD agreement provides no new federal financial commitment.

“We need to make sure we are advocating for additional state funds and additional federal funds,” Garcia said in the Council hearing, a sentiment de Blasio has echoed many times.

“The last 10 years have definitely been much more volatile” for NYCHA, Bloom said. “What’s the difference? The difference is money. When, after 2000, when NYCHA’s financial situation vis-à-vis the federal funds declined, and the city cut its funding, NYCHA became more volatile. The other fact is, they’ve also entered into a cycle where some of their buildings are old…[R]ight when you need the money most is when you’re not getting it because of cuts in federal support.”

***
by Truman Stephens, Gotham Gazette

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